Founding Engineer

Duets Network, Inc.- Founding Engineer Engagement Overview
Engagement Details**

• Engagement Type: Fractional, Ongoing
• Compensation Type: Equity
• Time Commitment: ~10-15 hours/week, with flexibility based on agreed priorities and deliverables
• Location: Remote (US), with occasional in-person availability preferred
• Primary Point of Contact: CEO
• Start Date: As mutually agreed

About Duets Network

Duets Network is an AI-powered platform connecting startups and investors across the sports and entertainment industries. We are building a dynamic ecosystem that bridges founders, capital, and strategic partners to drive meaningful growth and collaboration at the intersection of technology and culture. In addition to our platform, Duets operates a consultancy practice advising clients across the venture and startup ecosystem on strategy, partnerships, and growth.

About the Engagement

Duets’ Founding Engineer is responsible for working closely with leadership to set technology priorities and product strategy, technical architecture, product intelligence layer, security, and scalability of the platform. This opportunity is designed for a proactive, self-directed technical leader who brings ideas to the table, identifies opportunities for improvement, and can drive execution with little direction.

The platform is already built out, and the Founding Engineer is expected to help guide the technical roadmap moving forward, proactively surface recommendations, flag risks and bottlenecks early, and communicate clearly and consistently with the founding team.

Scope of Engagement

The anticipated scope implies a specific operating style and will:

• Assess and strengthen Duets’ technology foundation: Evaluate the existing platform, architecture, codebase, data infrastructure, development practices, technical debt, and overall scalability; identify near- and long-term priorities for improvement.
• Translate business and product vision into technology strategy: Work closely with the founding team to translate Duets’ vision, product roadmap, and business objectives into a clear technical roadmap, balancing product priorities, user experience, performance, security, scalability, and budget.
• Guide Duets’ technology architecture: Establish and maintain the overall technology stack, application architecture, infrastructure, APIs, integrations, development environments, and technical standards, ensuring the platform can scale as Duets grows.
• Drive continuous product and technical innovation: Identify opportunities to improve product performance, accuracy, intelligence, usability, and user experience. Explore new technologies and approaches that can make Duets more intelligent, efficient, and valuable to users.
• Develop Duets’ data and intelligence strategy: Establish the technical foundation for collecting, structuring, governing, and leveraging proprietary ecosystem data while ensuring appropriate privacy, security, and data-use practices.
• Advise leadership on technology decisions: Serve as the primary technical advisor to the founding team on architecture, infrastructure, integrations, AI technologies, data governance, vendor selection, technical risk, and build-vs.-buy decisions.
• Lead technical execution: Translate strategic priorities into actionable technical initiatives and ensure projects are appropriately scoped, prioritized, resourced, tested, and delivered.
• Coordinate with external engineering resources: Evaluate and oversee engineering agencies, contractors, developers, and technology vendors; review scopes, estimates, technical approaches, deliverables, timelines, and performance, ensuring external resources are aligned with Duets’ standards and objectives.
• Establish engineering and product practices: Implement appropriate processes for product planning, technical documentation, version control, QA/testing, analytics, deployment, releases, monitoring, incident management, and ongoing maintenance.
• Build for security, privacy, and compliance: Advise on the technical implementation of privacy, security, access controls, data protection, and applicable regulatory requirements in partnership with legal, privacy, and compliance stakeholders.
• Establish product analytics and performance measurement: Ensure Duets has the infrastructure and reporting needed to understand product usage, matching quality, engagement, conversion, retention, and other key product and technology metrics.
• Support API strategy and client integrations: Lead or support the technical rollout of Duets’ APIs and integrations, including evaluating technical requirements, supporting onboarding of potential clients and partners, and ensuring integrations are scalable and secure.
• Build the technical organization: Establish the engineering organization and technical talent strategy as Duets scales, including defining roles, evaluating candidates, selecting technical partners, and determining when capabilities should move in-house.
• Translate technical complexity for the founding team: Communicate complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, timelines, and opportunities in clear, accessible business language to ensure the founding team can make informed decisions.
• Provide ongoing technology and budget reporting: Provide monthly and quarterly reporting on product development, technology priorities, infrastructure, technical risks, vendor performance, team capacity, and technology-related budgets.
• Represent Duets externally, where mutually agreed: Represent Duets at relevant technology, startup, sports, entertainment, music, and investor conferences, events, dinners, and industry gatherings. Speaking engagements and thought leadership opportunities may be part of the engagement.

Core Technologies

• Frontend: React
• Backend: Node.js
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS
• Version Control & Deployment: GitHub
• Payments & Platform Services: Stripe

Required Qualifications

• We are an early-stage startup and are learning as we go. That said, we encourage interest from individuals who are excited about the opportunity and willing to learn alongside us, even if you don't meet all criteria.
• Low-ego and collaborative, someone who builds trust quickly with a small team
• Hands-on experience building or leading matching, recommendation, or scoring systems and technologies
• Track record of owning technical architecture and infrastructure decisions end-to-end, with limited or no supporting team
• Experience standing up DevOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines from scratch, including testing, monitoring, and deployment processes from the ground up
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical strategy and tradeoffs to non-technical founders, investors, or boards
• Experience partnering with AI/ML leaders or specialists to translate AI strategy and product vision into scalable, production-ready technology

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with marketplace or two-sided platform technology and working with complex user and relationship data
• Background in venture, startup ecosystem tooling, or sports/media/entertainment tech

Engagement Highlights

• Equity plus discretionary cash payment
• Fully remote. Team is based between Silicon Valley and Los Angeles
• Flexible availability structured around deliverables and priorities
• Direct collaboration with an experienced founding team (CEO, ex-Universal Music Group; CBO, ex-Andreessen Horowitz)
• the opportunity to establish and influence the technology foundation and engineering organization
• Exposure to Duets' investor and founder network across the sports, media, and entertainment ecosystem

The scope of the engagement, equity terms, intellectual property, confidentiality, and other applicable terms will be governed by the parties’ written agreement.